That Damned Camping Trip
by sissyHIYAH
Summary: Xu accompanies Quistis on a weekend camping trip. Things do not go as expected.


When Quistis told her that they were going to do something fun that weekend, Xu figured that tiny umbrellas and bikinis would be involved. Possibly coconuts. Tiny bikinis would have been better than tiny umbrellas, but given that most of Quistis' bikinis were tiny to begin with, she wasn't going to complain. They were easy enough to remove, anyway.

Quistis trusted Xu, and only Xu, with the application of sunblock and the tying of bikini strings. She was her best friend, her confidante, her true-blue companion. Nobody else would be as attentive, as careful, as dedicated. Xu was the only one that would spend an hour massaging SPF into her skin, rubbing lotion into areas that the sun rarely touched. Quistis appreciated caution, especially when it came to her skin, and if Xu felt that it was necessary to apply a thick layer of coconut-scented sunscreen on her inner thighs, then so be it. And there was nobody else that could tie her bathing suit so that the strings met perfectly along her spine. Xu would tie it and retie it, pulling the strings through the cups, reaching around to make sure that said cups were indeed cupping as they should be, and only then would she tie the knot in such a way that there were no dangling bits to annoy her.

Good ol' Xu. Always so thorough.

Xu would never tell her that she was waiting on a strong wave to destroy that carefully rigged, ever-so-delicate knot, but that didn't matter today anyway, because there were no tropical drinks anywhere in sight, there were no palm trees, and there most certainly were no bikinis within a hundred-mile radius.

Sigh.

Trees, yes.

God, were there ever trees.

There were trees all over the goddamned place.

Who knew the mountains had so many trees? Trees on the left. Trees on the right. Trees above their heads. Huge, hulking bastards that seemed to be watching every step they took on this godforsaken hike. They weren't smiling at her like the palms in Balamb, leaning over like old friends to shield her from the sun. Not these monsters. She was certain that the creaking in the oaks was some ancient language and every other word was either "eat" or "kill." Any minute now and she expected some lichenous arm to reach out and toss them over the side of the mountain to be impaled on the pointy head of one of Old Man Oak's buddies down below.

Up and up and up.

The air was thick, the path was barely there, and to their right, there was a lovely series of potentially lethal drops cushioned only by boulders and the welcoming arms of the murder trees. They scrambled over roots and shifting stones, over vines and under low-hanging branches, trying all the while to not do something stupid like dying. All it would take would be one missed step, then bam. Next thing you know, you're tumbling off a cliff and your innards would become….what? Outards?

Quistis didn't seem bothered in the slightest. On the contrary, she was skipping along the narrow path, happy as a clam-which they could be eating right now, if they weren't lost in the fucking forest with homicidal hardwoods plotting to knock them over their heads and drag them to...wherever it was that trees killed people. Copses? Made sense. It was only one consonant removed from corpse, after all, and that's what they were going to be. Unbearably sexy corpses that hadn't even reached their sexual peaks.

How the hell was she even skipping, anyway? They each had a solid forty pounds of gear on their backs, tents and cooking supplies and dehydrated food that surely must have rehydrated in the humid air. Raisins should not weigh enough to kill a man if you lobbed one at his head, but she had a feeling that if some bearded mountain man wearing nothing but a coonskin cap came tearing out of the woods with a hatchet above his head (Of course her mental maniac would have a hatchet. Xu was a traditionalist, after all.) then a carefully aimed rehydrated raisin of death would cave his skull in.

Ugh.

How long had they walked? An hour? Four hours? Six years? They had starved to death on the trail and they were stuck in some woodland purgatory?

The sun had barely broken the horizon when they were dropped off at the trailhead, but that was forever ago and what little light there had been was long gone, hidden behind ominous gray clouds. The cloud cover had increased as the day wore on and Xu smelled rain.

Well, rain and herself.

Okay, herself mainly.

Shut up.

The humidity, the midday heat and the exercise, had her sweating so much that her clothes were sticking to her skin and salty droplets were running into her eyes. She shook her hair off her forehead and hurried to catch up to Quistis, who was way ahead of her and sweating just as much as...

As much as...

Oh.

Oh….

Holy Oiled Calves and Thighs...

Were her shorts that short when they left that morning? Xu hadn't noticed, but then again, Quistis was riding shotgun and sensibly explaining their planned route to Squall in case they lost their compass or maps. Xu had been in the backseat, digging through her pack to make sure she had packed her flask, her backup flask, and her emergency flask, because if they were going to spend three days in the wilderness, then she damn sure wasn't going to be sober for most of it. She hadn't noticed that damned long-sleeve buttondown "lightweight mosquito protection" shirt on her beloved bestie's shoulders, but that was mainly because it covered Quistis from neck to hips. Hateful dickhead of a garment. Xu had never considered that clothes could be malicious, but she had obviously been naive. So, so naive.

The shorts, though. Those had remained a mystery, at least until now.

Not only were the muscles in Quistis' legs pumping and stretching and coiling underneath her perfect skin, but they were shining like she was just climbing out of the oil wrestling tub like in that fantasy Xu had daydreamed about every day since she was 16. The one where they were at that lesbian bar and Quistis overpowered her and everyone cheered, but they were also a little jealous because it wasn't them that had Quistis' knees on both arms and sliding around and...

"SHIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiii…..iiitttttttt..t.t.t..t!"

That root had _not_ been there before, she was certain of it, and it was very rude of it to grab her ankle and send her plummeting down the edge of the path. Of course, were it not for more of the bastards tangling around her legs, Xu might have slid all the way to the bottom of the mountain. She wasn't entirely sure if she was upside-down or right-side up (given that there was nothing to see but goddamned trees every-fucking-where, and limbs looked exactly like roots when you're careening head over heels to one's potential doom) but she knew that gravity was a straight-up bitch.

"Xu! You okay?"

Quistis leaned over the precipice, pushing through undergrowth to find her suddenly-vanished friend.

Xu shook leaves and dirt from her hair. "Yeah, I'm okay. Just twisted my ankle."

Oh, but the concern in those glorious blue eyes made the blood on her shin worth the tumble to near-death.

"Gimme just a sec to climb back up….."

Crop-top.

Quistis had unbuttoned the buttons on that hateful shirt and revealed a skin-tight, soaked-with-sweat, clinging-to-her-magical-mountains crop-top. Xu had taken anatomy and physiology. She knew the names of every muscle in the human body, but she was reminded of those long-ago lessons when she saw every flat inch of Quistis' belly. Rectus abdominis. Abdominis oblique. Sexiness bellycus. Perfectis navel piercingicus.

"…climb. Uh…."

"You're bleeding."

Bah! It was just a scratch, a mere abrasion on...

Oh holy fuck, she really _was_ bleeding. The entire length of the skin on her right shin had been skimmed off, and while it wasn't anything to worry about, it sure as hell looked awful. Some tree was probably chewing her epidermis like bubblegum. She looked around to see if any of the trees might be trying to blow a Xu-shinskin bubble, but nope. At least she wouldn't have to worry about shaving that leg, ha ha.

Quistis dropped her pack and slid down the slick path worn by her gravity-prone best friend. Disentangling her from the roots proved simple enough, but carrying Xu's pack back to the trail proved more difficult than it should have been.

"My god, what do you have in here? We're just camping for three days!"

Xu froze in mid-scramble. Quistis _should_ have been haggard with concern over her bleeding friend. She _should_ have been kissing her cheeks and neck and shoulders and chest and...uh, grateful that she hadn't fallen to the roaring river below. She didn't need to worry about the contents of her pack.

"Little help?"

Quistis, sniffing the contents of Flask One (which contained a whiskey blend that was goddamned expensive. And also illegal. Like, really illegal. Like, at least a year in prison illegal. But man, was it ever delicious, and thus, worth the risk.) ignored Xu.

"Uh….I am bleeding a fair bit, you know."

Xu shuffled halfway up the hill and slid back, grimacing when she saw Quistis open the flask and sniff the whiskey within.

"That's...uh, medicinal."

She didn't pour it out, thank whatever forest spirits were currently showing mercy to her. She shuffled faster, before Quistis found Flasks Two (Fancy rum, powerful and sweet and thick. Great on the rocks.) and Flask Three (Cheap popskull. Potent and flammable. It was wrapped in damp cloths, just in case the friction of the objects in her pack caused sparks. It was rumored to be the reason that Timber's forests weren't exactly forests anymore. The Great Fire of '78 was legend not only for the fires started by the moonshiners, but because of the lost revenue from illicit liquor.)

Rain began trickling through the branches, slowly at first, then steadily and maliciously. Mud was making obscene sucking noises around her boots as she climbed back to the trail.

She snatched her bag and shimmied her way back into the filthy straps.

Straps.

Damn it.

"I don't think we're going to reach the top of the mountain today, Q."

Quistis was buttoning her shirt again. The forest really did have it in for her.

"We weren't heading to the top of the mountain in the first place, which you would realize if you had listened to the itinerary in the car this morning."

Shit.

"I uh, did listen..."

"To the radio."

That wasn't fair. It was one of her favorite songs. It had nothing to do at all with trees or rivers or traitorous jungle growth that tried to kill her.

"I _am_ bleeding, you know."

Well, the bleeding wasn't as bad now that she wasn't trapped against the trunk of a devil pine, a mangled heap of misunderstood and underappreciated flesh, but still. It did sting a little, and if a little pity scored some points, then why not milk it?

"Fine. We'll find a place to set up the tent, then I'll patch you up. The trail is too slippery to get to the waterfall today, anyway."

Xu felt marginally guilty. If not for her rabid animal lust, they might have already made it to wherever the hell it was Quistis wanted to go.

"Waterfall, huh? Is that where you wanted to camp this weekend?"

Waterfalls meant water, and water meant mosquitoes, and given that Xu had lost half the volume of her blood and was covered in the fluid of her own lifeforce, the thirsty little vampires would no doubt be circling her poor leg like vultures.

"Well, camping is part of it."

The rain was doing magical things to the shirt that Xu previously hated so much. Truly, cotton blends combined with rainfall meant that fabric clung to flesh in divine ways. It wasn't so much that the buttons were strained against her chest, though that was the majority of it. Nor was it that...

Okay, goddamnitall.

Her tits looked fucking amazing in that wet shirt. Was admiring them a crime? Who invented the laws anyway?

"We need to find a place to set up camp."

Yes, setting up camp was a marvelous idea. The glow from a boisterous fire, the romantic sighing of the river below, peeling off layers of sodden clothing, cuddling together for warmth...

"There's a flat place just up ahead. Maybe we should set up the tent there."

"The tents, you mean."

Xu blinked. She had left her tent in the back of Squall's car. It was an annoying thing, some monstrous collection of nylon and poles and weird pockets.

Pockets.

In a tent.

Who the hell would ever need pockets in a temporary home? What, was she supposed to keep her wallet there? It was a stupid thing, some giant flap of fabric that wouldn't keep out anything except perhaps the laziest of moths, so she left it behind.

"Uh..."

Quistis turned, all wet clothes and smooth legs and clinging cotton, and Xu had to focus to remember that the forest hated her and wanted to empty her bowels out on the same hateful trail upon which she currently stood. Her intestines would be draped among the boughs for years to come as a warning to any foolhardy enough to venture this far into the hills.

"Uh, what? Is there something you need to tell me?"

Oh dear. Quistis was doing that thing where her voice was dripping with poisoned honey. Not only was she attentively listening with keen interest, but she was cataloguing every syllable, every word. Xu knew better than to be lulled by those dulcet tones. Quistis _never_ sounded _that_ sweet when she was questioning anyone. There was a reason that she was exempt from the advanced interrogation courses when they were students. The instructors couldn't keep up with her.

"I uh…."

"You 'forgot' your _tent_?"

The emphasis on the final consonant reminded Xu of a steel trap snapping shut on the bones of an unfortunate fox or wombat or some other pitiful animal.

"Well…."

She was going to die, one way or another. It was either a stab-happy murder tree or Quistis bludgeoning her to death with her derailed plans.

Quistis' eye twitched for a moment, but whatever emotions she was feeling were contained. Xu wasn't sure if she was relieved or if she should consider diving off the cliff again.

"It doesn't matter. We can share my tent."

Wait. Share a tent? Curled against the most beautiful dryad that had ever graced the forest? Wrapped in some dream that only the divine could spin from thread as golden as the hair currently stuck to said dryad's sweaty forehead? Was this a dream? Had they in fact died on the trail? Was this Heaven?

"It'll be tight…"

Gulp.

"We might have to wiggle around until we're comfortable…"

Gulp again.

"And we'll probably have to leave our clothes outside the tent to dry. I know it's warm, but our skin is damp from the rain and getting a chill is…"

"I'M GETTING A CHILL!"

Xu didn't _mean_ to yelp like a paranoid coyote, but she _was_ shivering. She was far from cold, but the thought of accidental brushes against exposed bits of skin and what might lead to how and where and come to think of it, was it possible to scissor in such a small tent when Quistis had legs longer than most major highways?

Quistis raised a single, perfectly plucked eyebrow.

"Then perhaps we should hurry and get the tent set up so we can…"

But Xu was already galloping up the trail, heading for the nearest flat place so they could toss that impossibly flimsy shelter on the ground and start a romantic fire.

"Up here?"

Yep. Up there, where lightning or wildfire or the wrath of the gods themselves had blasted an area the size of the training grounds into soot. There were no trees, at least not the sort that scared Xu. Those were mere skeletons of trees, blackened stones and scorched earth, and those were easily dealt with. Dead things did not frighten her. It was the living world that made her walk through life with her fists clenched.

"Is this okay?"

Quistis frowned that pretty frown she had when she was thinking. It usually meant that any of Xu's suggestions would be shot down like ducks during the opening of hunting season, but it was almost worth it to see her pout.

"Maybe, though we'll have to camp under those rocks over there, away from the treeline. If an electrical storm hits, I don't want to be anywhere near the trees. It looks like this place has already been blasted."


End file.
